TY - JOUR
AU - Myers, Bernadette
AB - Critics have long interpreted the collaboratively authored Sir Thomas More as a play about the figure of the stranger. In many ways, this interpretation makes sense. The play’s opening scenes dramatize the historical events of May Day 1517—Ill May Day—when hundreds of rioters violently attacked London’s stranger population and pillaged their homes in the neighborhood of St. Martin’s Le Grand. Master of Revels Edmund Tilney famously marked these scenes for deletion and struck out references to “strangers” and “Frenchmen” throughout the manuscript. Picking up on Tilney’s concerns, later critics have linked the play to anti-alien tensions plaguing London at the end of the sixteenth century.1 In this period, not only was xenophobia rampant, but the legal status of the stranger was fundamentally unstable—an instability evident in the proliferating terms, including alien, foreigner, and denizen, that could define them.2 This complicated history of the stranger has had important implications for how critics interpret the textual history of Sir Thomas More as well. According to Jeffrey Masten, for instance, a “persistent rhetoric of strangeness” unites the surviving manuscript, which bears the traces of six different authorial hands.3 Drawing on the “classificatory multiplicity” of the stranger, then, critics have shown how the individual subjects of Sir Thomas More—both foreign and native, citizen and stranger, even author and collaborator—are embedded in “relational process[es]” of identification that are always in the making.4 This essay reorients these important conversations around ecological rather than social relations to show how London’s food and its networks of distribution are also implicated in Sir Thomas More’s concern with strangeness. To excavate the play’s ecological interests, I dig into the rioters’ infamous complaints about the importation of “strange roots,” including parsnips and pumpkins, which they believe breed social unrest and disease.5 Though the rioters comically confuse different vegetable kinds, I read this confusion as an invitation to rethink the paradoxical nature of London’s “roots” both materially and metaphorically. Over the course of the sixteenth century, London developed into a burgeoning center of international commerce, but a series of droughts, inadequate provisioning policies implemented by City and Crown authorities, and uncontrollable population growth meant that the metropolis was increasingly dependent on food imported from both the English countryside and foreign countries for survival. The rioters’ complaints about “strange roots,” introduced in the section of the manuscript attributed to Shakespeare, expose these anxieties about provisioning the city and crystallize a broader metaphorics of resource dependence that permeates the composite text.6 To resolve anxieties about London’s dependence, the play figures Thomas More as the ideal city official and imagines his management of his household as an alternate model for urban provisioning, capturing in a single figure the City–Crown cooperation needed to sustain London. The play’s turn to More and his household might seem impossibly idealistic, especially considering his gradual retreat from public action toward the play’s conclusion; nevertheless, in linking urban stability to generous provisioning, Sir Thomas More demonstrates an awareness that social and economic tensions are deeply entangled with the ecological systems that produced and accompany them. In reading the composite Sir Thomas More as a text shaped by food scarcity, this essay seeks to broaden the parameters of Shakespearean ecocriticism in order to consider the city as an environment worthy of its own critical attention. Today, almost half of the world’s population lives in cities and, consequently, urban ecosystems are starting to garner the same conservation significance once reserved for rural, sparsely populated, or “wild” regions.7 The environmental justice movement has also reoriented the politics of mainstream environmentalism around the interests of urban communities, where immigrants and people of color are often disproportionately affected by environmental degradation.8 Shakespeare’s London was already undergoing many of the ecological changes that would give rise to the anti-city bias of contemporary environmentalism: rapid population growth, polluted waterways, declining air quality, and unequal access to food.9 Citing these changes, some critics have begun to reconsider the “urban phenomenon” of the theater from an ecological perspective.10 Despite these critical developments, Shakespearean ecocriticism tends toward thematic readings of plays and scenes that seem to be explicitly about nature, understood as “animals, plants, or the weather,” which means that ecocritics risk maintaining the very nature/culture divide that they purport to break down.11 Owing, in part, to its unique textual history, Sir Thomas More serves as an ideal text to redefine what counts as “nature” for early modern ecocriticism. The surviving manuscript remains one of the best and most complex records of theatrical revision, consisting of a so-called Original Text likely composed by Anthony Munday around 1599–1600, then censored by Tilney, and later augmented and revised by five other hands, probably around 1603–4.12 From a strictly historicist perspective, the contributions to Sir Thomas More most explicitly interested in food do not align neatly with the worst harvest failures in late sixteenth-century England. But the polychronicity of the manuscript makes it particularly amenable to ecocritical methodology, which demands reading and writing along different spatial and temporal scales—often “flickering” between the past and the present, “zooming in and out” of local and global contexts, or “rescaling” between parts and wholes.13 These multiscalar reading strategies all seek to understand how literature reflects, occludes, and participates in the long history of ecological change. Adopting this ecocritical flexibility, particularly as it relates to time, this essay rethinks how the different versions of Sir Thomas More address food scarcity, not only as it materializes in a single famine or an exceptional riot, but also as a long-term socioecological problem that peaked at particular moments.14 When we read the composite manuscript of Sir Thomas More from this angle, we can see how its interest in food scarcity subtends the play in all its manifestations but flares into prominence only occasionally, particularly in the additions to the revised manuscript attributed to Shakespeare. To better understand the relationship between the different versions of Sir Thomas More, the urban experience, and food scarcity in the longue durée, this essay develops over three sections. First, I read the Original Text against the food crisis that unfolded during the 1590s to consider how the play’s depiction of an infamous anti-alien riot resonates with anxieties about access to and distribution of food. In the next section, I turn to Addition II, which introduces explicit complaints about food scarcity in order to expose how London’s precarious position of resource dependence fuels xenophobic sentiment. In exposing this dynamic, Addition II, especially the contribution attributed to Shakespeare, performs ecocritical work on the Original Text by foregrounding the pernicious sociopolitical effects of an ecological problem that affected London not just in the 1590s but throughout the early modern period. If these pages were indeed penned by Shakespeare, their ecological insights (which he would continue to refine and revise throughout his career, most notably in Coriolanus) suggest an interest in questions of food scarcity and distribution that does not sit easily alongside his own distributive activities as a landowner and possible grain hoarder.15 In the final section, I respond to Masten’s call to read Sir Thomas More “across hands” by tracing its figuration of More as the ideal provisioner in both the Original Text and the Additions.16 Here, More resolves the urban instability of the plot precisely because he embodies the resource dependence that made London unique. From the composite play, then, emerges a dynamic illustration not just of More but also of an ecosystem in flux and of the problems of provisioning at its core. I The Original Text of Sir Thomas More was likely composed at the end of a decade of unprecedented, debilitating dearth.17 Over the course of the sixteenth century, the growth of the English population gradually outstripped the growth of the crops on which it depended.18 Four bad harvests between 1594 and 1597 inaugurated the worst grain shortages since the beginning of the century.19 Scarcity and the accompanying inflation of food prices were compounded by the Spanish Wars and the Irish Rebellion, which drained resources from across the country.20 Food riots broke out nationwide, but Londoners were especially vocal about the inadequate distribution of food in the capital. At the heart of London’s complaint was the fear that city officials were unable (or worse, unwilling) to provision the city. As food and grain prices reached their peak in 1595, seditious libels circulated attacking officials suspected of malfeasance, including Lord Mayor Sir John Spencer, better known as “Rich” Spencer, and the city saw its first food riots since the 1520s.21 On June 12, rioting apprentices forced fishwives to sell their fish at lower prices established by popular demand. The following day in Southwark, another group of apprentices confiscated overpriced butter to sell it for three pence a pound instead of five.22 The mob’s relative discipline and the decision of its members to assume responsibility for provisioning indicate that the crowd was less interested in sowing disorder than in guaranteeing access to affordable food. Taken together, rising food prices and the resulting riots contributed to a general climate of scarcity that permeated urban life well past the 1590s. Some plays from this period, such as Thomas Heywood’s Edward IV, Part One (1599) and Thomas Dekker’s Shoemaker’s Holiday (1599), responded to this climate of scarcity by erasing it, imagining London as a self-sustaining cornucopia. In Heywood’s play, for instance, a group of Englishmen who oppose the usurpation and imprisonment of Henry VI stage a rebellion and decide to invade London, but they lose focus while fantasizing about the “furnished feast” they expect to find lining London’s streets (2.82).23 Similarly, impossible quantities of food contribute to the celebratory tone of Dekker’s play, particularly the pancake feast hosted by the newly appointed Lord Mayor at the play’s conclusion.24 In the wake of the 1590s food crisis, these celebrations of London, its food, and its generous citizens would seem to justify and even encourage urban consumption at a time when London was competing with the surrounding countryside for resources. If these plays all seek to “elevate London itself to a new place of preeminence among the great commercial cities of Europe,” as Jean Howard has argued, the cornucopian paradox they put forward also recasts the city as a self-sufficient ecosystem, independently producing, distributing, and consuming enormous quantities of food.25 Sir Thomas More has much in common with these plays. It places the lives of London citizens center stage, sidelines the controversial history of Henry VIII, and describes London geography with an incredible degree of specificity. But instead of erasing food scarcity completely, Sir Thomas More implicitly expresses concerns about access to and distribution of food through the figure of the violent and gluttonous stranger. The play opens with two violent altercations featuring such a figure. First, Doll Williamson, an English carpenter’s wife, is sexually assaulted by a stranger named Francis de Barde. Immediately following this incident, another stranger named Cavaler arrives and announces that he has stolen a pair of doves from Doll’s husband, who had purchased them in Cheapside market. The parallels between the two transgressions—the theft of food and of women—are magnified by Doll herself, who ridicules her husband’s overall incompetence when he returns from the market empty-handed: “What, one stranger take thy food from thee, and another thy wife? By’r Lady, flesh and blood, I think, can hardly brook that” (1.34–36). As Doll compares dove meat with her own sexualized body, she accuses strangers of threatening the English food supply as well as the marriages that this food supply sustains. References to food also appear in the accounts of Ill May Day documented in the chronicles of Raphael Holinshed and Edward Hall—primary sources for the play’s opening scenes. Both Hall and Holinshed identify the dispute over “two stockdooues” as the first “oppression” that ignites “malice in the Englishmens harts.”26 Holinshed even compares this malice to a “great hartburning” and highlights in the margins “the insolent sawcinesse of the Frenchmen” who dared to dictate what an Englishman should eat.27 But any explicit concerns about food that appear in Hall and Holinshed eventually recede beneath a much longer list of grievances, including that English artisans cannot find work, that foreigners bring in so many luxury products that no one buys locally, and that strangers practice forestalling, or purchasing goods before they reach public markets in order to inflate prices upon resale. With grievances mounting, the broker and rebel leader John Lincoln manages to persuade the canon Doctor Bele to read an official bill of complaints from the pulpit during Easter week. Reproduced almost word-for-word in the Original Text of Sir Thomas More, this bill describes how strangers not only “eat the bread from the fatherless children” but also steal English jobs, and generally reduce subjects to “beggerie,” “needinesse,” and “extreame pouertie” (1.118–34).28 Building on Hall’s and Holinshed’s accounts, then, the Original Text centers concerns about the destruction of commercial opportunities for English merchants and craftspeople. Hunger is simply a by-product. Sir Thomas More adheres closely to its source texts, particularly in its depiction of the rioters’ most explicit complaints, but the Original Text also departs from Hall and Holinshed in several important food-related ways. First, the Original Text weaves the language of provisioning and consumption throughout its riot scenes. For instance, Cavaler defends his right to steal Williamson’s meat, arguing that “[b]eefs and brewis may serve such hinds. Are pigeons meat for a coarse carpenter?” (1.24–25). Cavaler’s insult implies that lowly carpenters are not worthy of high-quality food like dove meat. Instead, they should eat English beef and “brewis,” bread soaked in broth, typical fare for the poor. In addition to asserting his own social superiority, Cavaler also emasculates Williamson by calling him a “hind,” both a servant and a female deer. Similarly for Doll, the Englishmen seem to have “milky hearts” (1.64), because they refuse to retaliate against the strangers and their “dainty appetite[s]” (1.71). By incorporating references to food throughout this scene, the Original Text of Sir Thomas More conflates concerns about masculinity, Englishness, and social status with concerns about access to and distribution of certain foods. Second, the Original Text explicitly links physical and sexual violence to acts of eating and drinking. Most notably, the playwrights invent the sexual assault on Doll Williamson to complement the dove meat dispute found in their source texts. But this is not the only link between violence and consumption forged in these opening riot scenes. After John Lincoln reads his bill of complaints to an angry audience of London citizens, they all decide to “friendly go and drink together” to plot the details of their revolt (1.149–50). In another scene, excised in its entirety by Tilney, a group of cudgel-wielding apprentices exchange a series of class-based jokes about fencing, a sport reserved for the gentry. One apprentice brags about “break[ing] an usher’s head” (OT1b.16–7), or besting an assistant to a fencing school master, when another apprentice named Robin arrives late and explains that he was out to “breakfast” (OT1b.5) in St. Anne’s Lane with the head drawer from the Mitre. The scene sonically links “breakfast” and the “breaking” of heads—a link that is reinforced by the fact that Robin’s “breakfast” is also likely code for violent protest. His breakfast spot, St. Anne’s Lane, is located in St. Martin’s Le Grand, the site where much of the May Day violence unfolded. The Original Text is careful not to stage any violence explicitly, but these acts of everyday consumption take on new meaning when considered against the longue durée of food scarcity and the occasional violence that it provoked. Both inventions of the Original Text—the language of provisioning and consumption, and the conflation of physical and sexual violence with food—appear in the scenes set at court as well. At first, the privy councillors take the riot and its implications for London’s food networks seriously. Sympathizing with the disgruntled London citizens, the Earl of Surrey is dismayed that “the aliens in this fruitful land” should display such “high-crested insolence,” even though the king’s “princely clemency” has allowed them to be “fattened with the traffic of our country” (3.11, 12, 9, 14). Even more explicitly, Shrewsbury worries that “our caters shall not use the market / For our provision but some stranger now / Will take the victuals from him he hath bought” (3.48–50), momentarily aligning himself and his household with Williamson and the plight of the Londoners who cannot hold on to their food. But Surrey also undermines his expressions of citizen solidarity through a series of jokes about provisioning, which trivialize the riot and mock the London citizens who fail to safeguard both their women and their household provisions. Surrey’s jokes, including puns like “he’s ill bestead that lends a well-paced horse / Unto a man that will not find him meat” (3.28–29), hinge on the fact that provisioning can refer to both feeding and sexually satisfying a woman, which Surrey assumes that neither strangers nor citizens can do well. In Hall and Holinshed, these jokes are voiced by Francis de Bard and other strangers at court, who are immediately reprimanded by English merchants.29 In Sir Thomas More, they are placed in the mouths of the privy councillors, recasting the court as an irresponsible, self-interested force. Sir Richard Cholmley openly criticizes the councillors’ behavior, chiding Surrey for his inappropriate sense of humor (3.30) and interrupting the exchange between the earls to insist that “men of your place and greatness are to blame” (3.65), especially in failing to report “this base abuse” to the king (3.67). Through the addition of Cholmley and the council’s rhetorical mismanagement of provisioning, this scene complicates the Privy Council’s intentions and subtly calls into question its ability to manage the city effectively in a time of need. Thus far, I have argued that the specter of food scarcity haunts these opening scenes, but the Original Text also layers and multiplies the rioters’ grievances far beyond the initial altercation over stolen dove meat and the subsequent food-based insults. In this version of civil insurrection, everything from immigration and trade regulations to unemployment and the lack of due process is at issue. This dramatic multiplication of the riot’s causes might obscure some of the resonance of food scarcity, but it also hints at the complexity of London’s provisioning problems in the 1590s, which no one quite knew how to resolve. Historically, governmental responses to the food crisis were difficult to enforce, and often contradictory.30 In 1594, Queen Elizabeth reissued the Book of Orders, which aimed to relieve dearth by compelling the transfer and storage of grain stocks to shift from private hands to open, public markets. The Orders, issued subsequently with little revision in 1595, 1608, and 1620, gave justices of the peace the authority to investigate the stores of individual grain traders, millers, bakers, brewers, and maltsters and to confiscate any excess for public redistribution.31 City officials tried scapegoating even smaller-scale suppliers. In 1598, for instance, Hugh Alley, a freeman of the Plasterer’s Company, presented his Caveatt for the Citty of London to the Lord Mayor. In it, Alley worries about the chaotic state of London’s food markets, complaining that “a greedie kinde of people, inhabiting in and aboute the cittys Suburbe of the same called Haglers, Hawkers, Huxters and wanderers,” were overcharging Londoners for their food.32 During times of extreme dearth, the Privy Council took additional measures against what it saw as wasteful behavior perpetrated by city officials. On August 8, 1596, after a third poor harvest, the Privy Council wrote to the Lord Mayor and the aldermen identifying Londoners’ “excessive dyet” as a special cause of dearth and requesting that citizens “hencefourth abstayne greate feastinge and superfluous fare, and use more moderate and spare dyett.”33 The frequency of such legislative initiatives, together with the repeated and contradictory attempts to assign blame, suggests that efforts to alleviate food scarcity met with little success. Indeed, as the later Additions to Sir Thomas More illustrate, the problem of provisioning London would continue well into the seventeenth century. II Likely composed around 1603–4, the Additions and revisions to Sir Thomas More, particularly Addition II, magnify the ecological concerns of the Original Text by reorienting their version of the riot to emphasize explicit complaints about rising food prices and the supposedly harmful qualities of foreign food imports such as parsnips and pumpkins. It is unlikely the revisers would have read the manuscript in its entirety; nevertheless, these new complaints crystallize the concerns about food scarcity and provisioning that haunt the Original Text, suggesting that Shakespeare, Addition II’s most probable author, considered food scarcity to have unique urban resonances that deserved dramatic investigation.34 Critics often dismiss these new food-based concerns as irrelevant, illogical, or intended for comic relief.35 And, indeed, it seems likely that the version of the insurrection presented in Addition II was designed to defuse the threat posed by the rebels, perhaps in an effort to placate the censor. But in locating complaints about food scarcity and imports at the center of its “race riot,” Addition II not only dramatizes the irrationality of xenophobia, but it also reframes it as a socioecological problem arising in part from London’s precarious position of resource dependence.36 In foregrounding the ecological roots of urban instability, then, Shakespeare’s interventions in Addition II perform ecocritical work, leveraging the resources of dramatic form to expose the social and political consequences of food scarcity and to critique the inequitable distribution of food for urban communities. By the beginning of the seventeenth century, combating food scarcity and its fallout for London had become a priority for court and city officials. Purchasing and storing food to prevent future dearth was always a cornerstone of English social policy, particularly in an effort to ensure London’s stability.37 But after the harvest failures of the 1590s, the Privy Council regularly ordered city officials to supplement their grain stores, especially in years of plenty, straining already tense City–Crown relations.38 In addition to periodic harvest failures, the capital also had to negotiate population growth, which influenced a “long, large rise in the general level of prices,” particularly for agricultural commodities, from 1500 to 1650.39 To keep prices down, city officials increasingly provisioned London through controversial, out-of-market food purchases.40 During times of dearth, London imported emergency supplies of foreign corn (i.e., grain), primarily from the Baltic; these were so abundant in 1597 that the Privy Council ordered city officials to transport the surplus to other counties.41 At the same time, London’s food markets witnessed the arrival of new delicacies from abroad as a result of general increases in overseas trade.42 The “city’s tentacles” also expanded within England, reaching well beyond the immediately surrounding districts to encompass the ports as far north as Hull.43 As this complex network of marketing arrangements suggests, the “privileged status” that London enjoyed was increasingly sustained by an ever-widening circle of domestic and foreign food imports.44 By the seventeenth century, there was a “general feeling that the city’s appetite was developing more quickly than the country’s ability to satisfy it.”45 In the words of one contemporary critic, London “seemes to be a Glutton, for shee desires alwayes to bee Full.”46 The needs of London, satirically expressed in terms of gluttony, are reflected in Addition II, though they are blamed, paradoxically, on London’s stranger population. This new version of the riot opens with John Lincoln, the riot ringleader, rallying the crowd: “He that will not see a red herring at a Harry groat, butter at eleven pence a pound, meal at nine shillings a bushel and beef at four nobles a stone, list to me” (6.1–4). Lincoln goes on to blame the presence of strangers in the city for the price hikes: “Our country is a great eating country; argo they eat more in our country than they do in their own” (6.7–8). Lincoln attempts to construct a scholarly sounding analogy to prove that strangers cause food scarcity, but misuses the Latin ergo. Through this analogy, Lincoln also inadvertently praises the English reputation for gluttony, while blaming the unsustainable appetite of strangers for the city’s food shortages. His scholarly incompetence is underscored by the interjections of Clown Betts, who renders the riot more comic and the insurgents more foolish. The addition of Clown Betts, often attributed to Heywood, helps defuse much of the riot’s threatening violence through well-placed songs and puns. “[W]e’ll tickle their turnips, we’ll butter their boxes! Shall strangers rule the roast? Yes, but we’ll baste the roast” (4.1–4), he proclaims, translating the actions of beating, thrashing, and cudgeling into an extended food-based joke. Betts’s humor functions much like Lincoln’s scholarly analogy: in conflating foreigners and food, the rioters attempt to rationalize an ecological problem, but their malapropisms only reinforce the sense that they have misunderstood its causes. Addition II also introduces complaints about the increase in foreign food imports such as parsnips, here called “strange roots,” which are easily conflated with aliens themselves. Such a complaint reflects the belief that foreign foods and, by extension, the strangers who ate them, weakened the English body politic: LINCOLN:  They bring in strange roots, which is merely to the undoing of poor prentices. For what’s a sorry parsnip to a good heart? WILLIAMSON:  Trash, trash. They breed sore eyes, and ’tis enough to infect the City with the palsy. LINCOLN:  Nay, it has infected it with the palsy, for these bastards of dung—as you know, they grow in dung—have infected us, and it is our infection will make the City shake. Which partly comes through the eating of parsnips. CLOWN BETTS: True, and pumpkins together. (6.11–21) Lincoln protests the presence of strangers in London by pointing to their strange, misshapen, corrupting foods.47 Specifically, “strange roots” and “sorry parsnip[s]” are considered unfit to eat because they cause bad eyesight and a nervous disease of paralysis. When Lincoln calls these vegetables “bastards of dung,” he is referring to the common market gardening practice of growing nonnative vegetables through manuring, a practice here understood as unnatural, akin to fostering or breeding strangers in the city.48 Foreign root vegetables were imported and then cultivated through market gardening—a Dutch innovation that increased in popularity in England at the end of the sixteenth century.49 Though Lincoln’s comments betray a prejudice against such practices and the foreign crops they were meant to cultivate, large shipments of root vegetables were staple imports from the Low Countries, increasingly brought in throughout the 1590s to help relieve dearth. Consequently, the poor took to eating and cultivating such root vegetables out of necessity, owing to the rising prices of grain and animal products.50 The rioters dismiss root vegetables because they imagine them to be unnaturally bred and therefore infectious, but these root vegetables and the market gardening practices imported by the Dutch were integral to supplementing London’s food stores. Thus, the rioters want to cut out “strange roots” and the strangers they signify, but it is on these resources that Londoners also depend. Though a cheap and plentiful food source, roots and other imported vegetables were often disparaged throughout the early modern period. In 1548, the poet William Forrest declared: “Our English nature cannot live by roots. / By water, herbs, or such beggary baggage / That may well serve for vile, outlandish coats.”51 In a work translated in 1586, the Flemish botanist Rembert Dodoens similarly dismissed the gourd, the family to which pumpkins belong. He claims that, when “eaten rawe and unprepared, [the gourd] is a very unholsome foode”—and even cooked, “it nourisheth but little.”52 Nevertheless, in times of dearth, roots and other vegetables were considered a cheap, easy-to-grow meal substitute. Hugh Plat’s Sundrie new and artificiall remedies against famine, published in 1596, includes recipes for “Bread, and other food made of Pompions,” “Sweete and delicate cakes” made from “parsnep rootes,” and “excellent bread of the rootes of Aaron called cuckowpit, or starch rootes.”53 This latter recipe, which calls for arum root (Arum maculatum), admits that “though [this root] should faile vs in this kind, yet we shall finde our labor richlie requited, if wee conuert them into starch only.”54 First published in 1597 and expanded in 1633, John Gerard’s Herbal claims that the root of the garden parsnip is “good to be eaten,” while the “fleshe or pulpe” of the pompion is “good and wholesome meate” unless “baked with apples in an ouen,” in which case it becomes “vnwholesome” for those who live idly. However, “vnto robustious and rusticke people, nothing hurteth that filleth the belly.”55 First printed in 1599 and reissued in 1603, Richard Gardiner’s practical gardening manual titled Profitable instructions for the manuring sowing and planting of kitchin gardens also advocated carrots and other root vegetables as “profitable” food, noting that the benefits of root vegetables “are not unknowne to the Citty of London.”56 By the early seventeenth century, even government officials were urging the poor to grow root vegetables and other foods commonly dismissed as unfit to eat.57 Rooted in these contemporary debates, Addition II’s emphasis on the precarious nature of urban food supplies also resonates with the insurrections staged in many of Shakespeare’s plays. Perhaps most famously, Coriolanus opens with a riot in which Roman citizens accuse the Senate of hoarding grain. Much like the insurrection depicted in Addition II, the riot in Coriolanus has been linked to different historical manifestations of food insecurity, including London’s 1590s food crisis and the Midlands Uprising of 1607.58 Even more striking is the fact that this Roman riot revisits the same concerns about urban environments and their “distributive irregularities” that permeate the earlier play—irregularities that the Roman patrician Menenius attempts to justify and naturalize when he delivers his infamous fable of the belly.59 But if Shakespeare’s version of early Republican Rome is a “distributive dystopia” where the elites hoard their bounty, as Hillary Eklund has argued, his vision of early sixteenth-century London seems much less skeptical of the official mechanisms of urban stability and food distribution.60 In the Original Text of Sir Thomas More, the king and the Lord Mayor are both absent and ineffectual, the latter trapped in his house by “poor artificers” (3.76). But in what might be Shakespeare’s version of the insurrection scene, civic and court officials are given much more positive and prominent roles. Members of the Privy Council are sent to help “pacify … this mutiny” (5.32) instead of watching it unfold from court. Meanwhile, the Lord Mayor sends forces to protect Cornhill and Cheapside, which also happened to be the locations of some of London’s most prominent grain stores (5.23–24). Before the riot even reaches its peak, the Lord Mayor, the Earls of Shrewsbury and Surrey, Sir Thomas Palmer, and the alderman Sir John Munday have all assembled at the Guildhall, presenting a unified government alliance between the city and the court.61 When More finally enters the fray, he emphasizes the numerous alliances that sustain urban life, though he insists that lawlessness and lack of authority, not strangers, render this dependence precarious. For More, the relationship between sovereign and subject, Englishmen and stranger, and London’s health and foreign food demands constant regulation and renegotiation:       Say now the King, As he is clement if th’offender mourn, Should so much come too short of your great trespass As but to banish you: whither would you go? What country, by the nature of your error, Should give you harbour? Go you to France or Flanders, To any German province, Spain or Portugal, Nay, anywhere that not adheres to England: Why, you must needs be strangers.                   (6.138–46) More’s rhetoric transforms English natives into the very strangers they would banish by placing his hearers in a “position of cross-identification.”62 In the likely event of their banishment, the English natives would become “strangers” in foreign lands. They would thus depend on the hospitality of other nations for survival. Though More calls for empathy, he also insists that the rule of law is necessary to keep such dependent relationships stable: Imagine that you see the wretched strangers, Their babies at their backs, with their poor luggage, Plodding to th’ ports and coasts for transportation, And that you sit as kings in your desires, Authority quite silenced by your brawl, And you in ruff of your opinions clothed: What had you got? I’ll tell you: you had taught How insolence and strong hand should prevail, How order should be quelled. And by this pattern Not one of you should live an aged man; For other ruffians, as their fancies wrought, With selfsame hand, self reasons, and self right, Would shark on you, and men, like ravenous fishes, Would feed on one another.                (6.85–98) More suggests that dependence between strangers and Englishmen itself is not the problem; rather, it is a lack of authority governing this tenuous interdependence that results in instability. He compares the rioters to kings who are clothed in the “ruff” of their opinion, but this “ruff,” which signifies their authority, is easily displaced by the “ruffians” who might mount their own rebellion in the future.63 Instead of this “pattern” of lawlessness, where one ruff replaces another in an endless cycle of disorder, More urges “obedience to authority” (6.107), reminding the crowd that the king is “a god on earth” (6.118) and that the rioters must not “lead the majesty of law in lyam,” or on a leash, “[t]o slip him like a hound” (6.137–38). Loss of authority, or rejection of the sovereign’s supremacy, More suggests, culminates in a dysfunctional ecosystem where men “like ravenous fishes / Would feed on one another.” Through this ecosystemic metaphor, More shows how a highly dependent city will become self-destructive, even cannibalistic, without the proper policies and authorities in place to manage it. As More’s riot-quelling speech begins to illuminate, urban instability stems not from the poisonous qualities of foreign food and the foreigners it represents, but from the mismanagement of the city and its resource dependence. III The composite Sir Thomas More offers its own dramatic solution to London’s provisioning problems in the form of More himself. Critics have long acknowledged that the play celebrates More as an “exemplary citizen.”64 Even after being promoted to the Privy Council, More still “set[s] a gloss on London’s fame” and promises to always “tend the City’s good” (9.100, 6.244). Yet these readings have overlooked how the play’s conception of More’s urban heroism is grounded in his reputation for generous and responsible provisioning. The rioters agree to listen to More only because they claim that he maintains a “plentiful shrievaltry,” or zone of jurisdiction as sheriff, and that he is a “good housekeeper” (6.51, 67–68). While Shrewsbury and Surrey use their court positions to shore up their own household food supplies, More conceives of his own role on the Privy Council differently:         O serious square! Upon this little board is daily scanned The health and preservation of the land, We the physicians that effect this good, Now by choice diet, anon by letting blood.             (10.13–17) Addressing the council table, which might double as a table for meals throughout the play, More contemplates his role as Lord Chancellor in administering to the commonwealth. Comparing the body politic to the human body, he casts himself as the ultimate physician, preserving the country’s health by offering certain foods or draining off infected blood. This metaphor seems particularly appropriate when considered alongside the rioters’ complaints about “strange roots.” Instead of eliminating these foods from the English diet, however, More models ideal provisioning in his boundless generosity: he refuses to vilify foreigners, he gives to the needy, and he regulates his household in a way that models good government at the city and royal levels. In figuring More as an antidote to instability, the playwrights built on More’s posthumous reputation for effective governance, especially the perception of More’s Utopia as a relatively practical text. Utopia was first translated into English in 1551 by Ralph Robynson, who identifies himself on the title page as a “Citizein and Goldsmythe of London” prompted to translate the text by “George Tadlowe Citizein & Haberdassher of the Same Cittie” in an effort to emphasize the translation’s civic appeal.65 As David Harris Sacks has shown, the crude title page, lack of marginal notes, and elimination of the original front matter “not only diminished the philosophical richness of the book, but also made it available to a reading public less likely to read it in the way that the learned had when it first appeared.”66 The publication history of the English translation suggests that the text was marketed as a practical guide, containing concrete strategies for combating urban instability. Robynson’s translation appeared in the aftermath of one of the worst outbreaks of social unrest England had experienced since Jack Cade’s rebellion a century before. The unrest was, of course, sparked by high food prices, the result of a bad harvest. Food prices and harvest conditions were even worse in 1556, when Abraham Vele published the second, revised edition of the Robynson translation. The next publication came in 1597, amid the worst harvests and highest food prices of the 1590s. A further edition of Robynson’s translation appeared in 1624, in yet another period of economic distress—this time the consequence of a deep trade depression and widespread unemployment in the cloth-making industry. This publication pattern strongly suggests that Utopia in translation had come to be viewed, at least in part, as a work with practical management strategies for addressing the economic and agricultural problems of the age.67 In the play, More specifically models the generous provisioning advertised in the publication history of Utopia through the management of his Chelsea estate, located five miles upriver from the city center. He hosts two feasts at Chelsea while serving as Lord High Chancellor of England. Both feasts appear in the Original Text, but they are emphasized as important points of visual and thematic continuity in Addition IV. At first, More treats the international visitor Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam to a banquet “with fresh and staid delights” appropriate for scholarly company: “The cates must be but mean where scholars sit; / For they’re made all with courses of neat wit” (8.218, 220–21). At the second feast, More treats the Lord Mayor and his accompanying aldermen to a diet “made dainty for the taste,” claiming that “of all people that the earth affords, / The Londoners fare richest at their boards” (9.20–22).68 The play applauds More’s capacity to provision these elite guests and to offer appropriate fare for each occasion, but he is best remembered for his generosity to his household staff and the poor. The staff at Chelsea (which includes a brewer, butler, horsekeeper, and porter) praise More for his generous hospitality even before they discover that he has gifted them all twenty nobles apiece (15.17, 49–50). And while reflecting on the fact that the king will inherit his estate, More describes himself as the “poorest chancellor / That ever was in England” (16.46–47), since he spent most of his money on “strange commodities” like “Crutches” and “bare cloaks, / For halting soldiers and poor needy scholars” (16.51, 55–56). While More’s generosity is increasingly celebrated over the course of the play, the court seems increasingly parasitic. More identifies the rapacious court diet as an important source of instability even in the Original Text. After being promoted to High Chancellor, he is asked to sign the Oaths of Succession, though the reference is oblique. When Surrey, Shrewsbury, and Downes, the sergeant-at-arms, request More’s signature, he wonders why they appear so melancholy, then concludes, “O, I know: you live in Court, and the Court diet / Is only friend to physic” (13.136–37). He implies either that the food at court makes the lords ill or that they are suffering from the effects of fashionable purgatives. More refuses to sign, and instead addresses the court: “The diet that thou drink’st is spiced with mace, / And I could ne’er abide it. ’Twill not digest, / ’Twill lie too heavy, man, on my weak breast” (13.162–64). Punning on mace, both an Indonesian spice derived from the outer covering of nutmeg seeds and the sergeant-at-arms’s staff of office, More insists that the court diet and its flashy symbols of authority are unhealthy or even poisonous to the body politic, embodied in More himself.69 His accusation thus reworks the rioters’ fear that “strange roots” are poisonous; but instead of accusing the imports themselves, or the foreigners they might represent, he criticizes the court for mismanaging its own appetite for that which is foreign. Throughout the play, and across hands, More’s household management is figured as a more sustainable form of resource dependence. As Peter Remien has shown, household management, or oeconomia, carries “protoecological importance,” since it represents “humanity’s interface with the natural world” in the early modern period.70Sir Thomas More articulates a similar “interface” when Catesby, More’s steward, describes how More’s fall from power has affected his household: “Thus the fair-spreading oak falls not alone, / But all the neighbor plants and under-trees / Are crushed down with his weight” (15.56–58). This metaphor describes a symbiotic relationship between More and his household staff; the very English oak tree, understood to be More, provides much-needed protection from the elements, which enables the smaller plants, or his servants, to thrive. The same metaphor crops up in Addition I, but its repetition across hands complicates the fantasy of symbiosis found in the Original Text. Before his imprisonment, More worries that his steward might have profited at his expense, briefly allegorizing himself and his steward as “Lord Spend-All” and “Master Gathers-All” (13.110), respectively. In discharging Catesby and other members of his household staff, he thus urges them to Think, when an oak falls, underwood shrinks down, And yet may live, though bruised. I pray ye strive To shun my ruin; for the axe is set Even at my root, to fell me to the ground.               (13.116–19) Perhaps rewritten to invoke the Gospels, this new metaphor highlights self-preservation rather than symbiosis.71 Here, the axe “set even at [his] root” represents both More’s impending execution and his increasing sense of self-estrangement—an estrangement that sits uneasily with the “strange roots” threatening English identity at the start of the play. In the Original Text, the steward articulates a different understanding of the radical dependence between More and his staff—a kind of dependence in which the “under-trees” cannot survive without the “oak.” Thus, when his servants collect their twenty-noble reward, they do so not “shrinking down” but rather “Fellow-like,” as “co-partners” (15.60) affected equally by adversity. As the revised version of this ecological metaphor begins to suggest, even More, with his generous provisioning and good household management, is ultimately an insufficient solution to real-world food scarcity and resource dependence. The playwrights seem to wrestle with these insufficiencies throughout the manuscript. Though the rioters in the play call for “More, More, More” (6.54), punning on the protagonist’s name, the historical More did not manage to quell the riots of Ill May Day. The fictional More also reflects on his own paradoxical insufficiencies as he falls from power: “Am I not leaner than I was before? / The fat is gone. My title’s only ‘More’” (11.69–70). Increasingly, More seems to embody both too much and not enough, both “lack and excess, reduction and expansion, a self defined as a supplement.”72 To preserve More’s reputation for generosity, then, the play becomes increasingly moralistic in its tone, shifting to emphasize More’s capacity for unending spiritual nourishment instead. When William Roper comforts his father-in-law after he is dismissed from court, he reminds More: How in this general court of short-lived pleasure, The world, creation is the ample food That is digested in the maw of time. If man himself be subject to such ruin, How shall his garment then, or the loose points That tie respect unto his awe-full place, Avoid destruction? Most honoured father-in-law, The blood you have bequeathed these several hearts To nourish your posterity stands firm.                (13.42–50) Roper makes a distinction between the earthly goods and the spiritual succor that More has provided to metaphorically “nourish” his family. The first form of nourishment, though more material, proves insubstantial; “creation” or preferment, symbolized by the “garments” or “loose points” worn by More in his role as Lord Chancellor, becomes the “ample food … of time,” digested and subsequently discarded as ephemeral. The second form of nourishment, described as the blood that runs through the veins of More’s progeny, “stands firm.” Through this suggestively Christological metaphor, Roper insists that More’s bond with his family offers an enduring spiritual nourishment, more substantial than the favors or food that More’s civic or court position might have supplied. But as More’s wife tearfully reminds him just before his imprisonment, spiritual nourishment will not feed his children. It thus registers as a frustratingly idealistic solution to the precarious conditions of scarcity that both More’s household and London will endure. This idealism is also operative in More’s performance of The Marriage of Wit and Wisdom, the play within the play that punctuates the feast for the Lord Mayor held at More’s Chelsea estate. As More orders his household staff to set the stage for the banquet, the Lord Cardinal’s Players, a traveling troupe comprising four men and a boy, arrive at his door, ready to “pleasure [him] and benefit [them]selves” (9.52). More selects The Marriage of Wit and Wisdom from their repertoire, inspired by its evidently “liberal argument” (9.66), but he remains concerned about his guests, who are still waiting for the final portion of their meal. He orders his servingman to “[p]rovide their supper ’gainst the play be done” (9.80), or to make the meal ready for the play’s conclusion, which means that his preparations for the banquet also double as preparations for the performance. Though the play is cut short, More sends his servingman with “eight angels” to reward the players’ efforts and to invite them to eat: “But sup before you go. / It is his will you should be fairly entreated” (9.318–19).73 This action is all the more important when we consider that Sir Thomas More, even in its revised state, necessitated doubling. The hungry artisans and tradesmen who drop out of More after the opening riot scenes might return as itinerant actors, invited to feast alongside More and the city’s ruling elite. Unlike the vexed, at times antagonistic, relationship between the theaters and city authorities throughout the 1590s, Sir Thomas More envisions a world in which a celebrated London sheriff selflessly shares his “bounty” (9.346) with players and scholars, rioters and mayors alike. Sir Thomas More thus dramatizes a rather familiar fantasy of sustainability. In this fantasy, the needs of a growing urban ecosystem will always be met by more, despite an increasing dependence on foreign and domestic food imports for survival—a situation not unlike what pertains in many megacities today. But while contemporary discourses surrounding sustainability tend to reify a false ideal of natural balance, Sir Thomas More articulates an alternative form of sustainability premised on the active participation, intervention, and generosity of humans like More—good managers who are willing to acknowledge and negotiate the complexities of urban resource dependence.74 Even from the scaffold, More continues to offer provisions, despite his own dwindling resources and status. He “bequeath[s]” his gown to the hangman of the Tower of London and, finally, his “reverent head” to the king (17.72, 78). To the very end, More is committed to radical resource redistribution as a strategy that might sustain the city even after his death. It seems particularly important that the play’s vision of London’s future depends on its past; each retelling of More’s story—the chronicle histories, the Original Text, and the Additions—revisits and reframes the persistent debates surrounding London’s provisions. If, as many critics have suggested, our current ecological crisis has “roots” in the early modern period, then Sir Thomas More begins to illustrate how those roots also informed a historical ecocritical ethos.75 Paradoxically, the theater industry benefited from the more self-interested provisioning that Sir Thomas More critiques. Unlike More’s estate, playhouses offered a form of nourishment that was distinctly commercial—provisioning hungry Londoners for a price.76 Food, including apples, nuts, and ale, was sold before, during, and after performances in London’s commercial theaters, and recently theater historians have concluded that eating was likely an integral part of experiencing a performance.77 Archaeological excavations at the Rose and Globe theater sites have unearthed material remains of this widespread consumption, revealing the sheer diversity of the foodstuffs apparently consumed by early modern audiences. The findings include domestically grown hazelnuts and walnuts, Kentish pippins and apples, Hertfordshire apples and pears, and cockles, mussels, and common oysters likely from the Thames estuary near Kent and Essex, as well as more exotic foods such as cherries and plums from the Low Countries and France, peaches from Spain and Italy, almonds imported in enormous quantities from Málaga, dried fruit such as prunes, figs, and raisins imported from across the Mediterranean, and even pumpkin seeds—which originated in the Americas but were being cultivated in England by the mid-sixteenth century.78 These food scraps suggest not only that playhouses were deeply embedded within London’s economic landscape but also, and perhaps more controversially, that they depended on ecosystems that were located increasingly farther from home. Footnotes 1 Ian Archer has argued that xenophobia was the most “basic element of the political consciousness of Londoners”; see Archer, “Popular Politics in the Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries,” in Londinopolis: Essays in the Cultural and Social History of Early Modern London, ed. Paul Griffiths and Mark S. R. Jenner (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2000), 26–46, 30. Critics have thus linked Sir Thomas More to different manifestations of xenophobia, both general and specific. On the introduction of a bill to Parliament in 1593 against foreigners selling foreign commodities, see Margaret Tudeau-Clayton, “‘This Is the Strangers’ Case’: The Utopic Dissonance of Shakespeare’s Contribution to Sir Thomas More,” Shakespeare Survey 65 (2012): 239–54; on the infamous Dutch Church Libel, a fifty-three-line poem posted in Broadstreet Ward in 1593 threatening strangers living in London with merciless persecution, see Sabine Schülting, “‘What country, friends, is this?’: The Performance of Conflict in Shakespeare’s Drama of Migration,” in Shakespeare and Conflict: A European Perspective, ed. Carla Dente and Sara Soncini (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 24–39; on the presence of immigrants and refugees in London, see E. A. J. Honigmann, “Shakespeare, Sir Thomas More, and Asylum Seekers,” Shakespeare Survey 57 (2004): 225–35; on the “stranger crisis” of the 1590s, see Eric Griffin, “Shakespeare, Marlowe and the Stranger Crisis of the Early 1590s,” in Shakespeare and Immigration, ed. Ruben Espinosa and David Ruiter (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014), 13–36, esp. 19–22; on the link between Sir Thomas More and current immigration concerns, see Espinosa and Ruiter, introduction to Shakespeare and Immigration, 1–12, esp. 4. 2 The terms stranger and alien could be used interchangeably to refer to immigrants, as well as to tourists, diplomats, and anyone just passing through the realm. The term foreigner referred to people from outside the city or region who were not “freemen,” or who did not belong to a guild; see Scott Oldenburg, Alien Albion: Literature and Immigration in Early Modern England (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2014), esp. 3–4, 146–47. On the figure of the denizen, see Alan Stewart, “‘Euery Soyle to Mee Is Naturall’: Figuring Denization of William Haughton’s English-Men for My Money,” Renaissance Drama 35 (2006): 55–81. 3 Jeffrey Masten, “More or Less: Editing the Collaborative,” Shakespeare Studies 29 (2001): 109–31, 118. 4 I have adapted these theoretical formulations from Marjorie Rubright, Doppelganger Dilemmas: Anglo-Dutch Relations in Early Modern English Literature and Culture (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2014), 17, 19. 5 Sir Thomas More, ed. John Jowett (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2011), 6.11. All subsequent references to Sir Thomas More will be taken from this edition and cited parenthetically. References to the Original Text, printed in appendix 1 of this edition, are also cited parenthetically. 6 Speculation about the possibility that Shakespeare contributed to Sir Thomas More began with Richard Simpson, “Are There Any Extant MSS. in Shakespeare’s Handwriting?,” Notes and Queries 4.8 (1 July 1871): 1–3. Paleographic, stylistic, and bibliographic arguments claiming to have identified Shakespeare’s hand in the manuscript were first collected in Shakespeare’s Hand in the Play of Sir Thomas More, ed. A. W. Pollard et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1923); these arguments were revisited and expanded in Shakespeare and “Sir Thomas More”: Essays on the Play and Its Shakespearian Interest, ed. T. H. Howard-Hill (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989). Jowett’s edition of Sir Thomas More reviews the evidence extensively and concludes that the “case for Shakespeare looks more secure than ever” (452). For arguments against Shakespearean attribution, see Arthur F. Kinney, “Text, Context, and Authorship of The Booke of Sir Thomas Moore,” in Pilgrimage for Love: Essays in Early Modern Literature in Honor of Josephine A. Roberts, ed. Sigrid King (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 1999), 133–60, and Paul Werstine, “Shakespeare, More or Less: A. W. Pollard and Twentieth-Century Shakespeare Editing,” Florilegium 16 (1999): 125–45. More recently, Michael L. Hays has argued that any effort to construct a paleographic argument identifying Shakespeare’s hand in the manuscript is an “exercise in futility”; see “Shakespeare’s Hand Unknown in Sir Thomas More: Thompson, Dawson, and the Futility of the Paleographic Argument,” Shakespeare Quarterly 67.2 (2016): 180–203, 202. 7 Established in the 1970s, the scientific field of urban ecology studies the interactions between living organisms and their surroundings in high-density, human-built environments. For an introduction to urban ecology, see Ian Douglas and Philip James, Urban Ecology: An Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2015). Today, according to the 2018 Revision of World Urbanization Prospects estimated by the Population Division of the Department of Economic and Social Affairs of the United Nations, about 55 percent of the world’s population resides in urban areas, and by 2050 that figure is projected to be 68 percent; see “2018 Revision of World Urbanization Prospects,” United Nations: Department of Economic and Social Affairs, May 16, 2018, https://www.un.org/development/desa/publications/2018-revision-of-world-urbanization-prospects.html (accessed February 18, 2022). 8 Environmental justice activists define the environment as “the place you live, work, play, go to school, and worship”; see Robert D. Bullard, Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class, and Environmental Quality (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2000), xiii. Giovanna Di Chiro has also shown how most mainstream environmentalists would find this formulation incomprehensible, even ethically indefensible, because of its apparent anthropocentrism; see “Nature as Community: The Convergence of Environment and Social Justice,” in Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature, ed. William Cronon (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995), 298–320, esp. 301. 9 On the environmental degradation plaguing early modern London, see Bruce Boehrer, Environmental Degradation in Jacobean Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2013). Though Shakespeare did not write about London as explicitly as his contemporaries, scholars have long understood that the city and its markets affected theatrical practice as well as the plots and themes of many of his plays. See, for instance, John Michael Archer, Citizen Shakespeare: Freemen and Aliens in the Language of the Plays (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); Douglas Bruster, Drama and the Market in the Age of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992); Steven Mullaney, The Place of the Stage: License, Play, and Power in Renaissance England (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1988); and Gail Kern Paster, The Idea of the City in the Age of Shakespeare (Athens: U of Georgia P, 1985). 10 Boehrer, Environmental Degradation, 4. See also Hillary Eklund, Literature and Moral Economy in the Early Modern Atlantic: Elegant Sufficiencies (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2015), 53–87; Christopher D. Foley, “‘Breathe Less, and Farther Off’: The Hazardous Proximity of Other Bodies in Jonson’s The Alchemist,” Studies in Philology 115.3 (2018): 505–23; and Karen Raber, Animal Bodies, Renaissance Culture (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2013), 127–50. 11 Timothy Morton, Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2007), 2. Shakespearean ecocriticism has focused overwhelmingly on As You Like It, King Lear, and The Tempest, all plays that deal overtly with environmental themes. Much important work has been done and remains to be done on these plays and on animals, plants, and the weather, but I highlight these topics to extend Morton’s critique of conventional ecocriticism. Morton calls instead for a “widescreen” version of ecological culture—a version that might look at any text, not just the most obvious ones, to ask, “what does this say about the environment?” (5). 12 The dating of the Original Text, Additions, and revisions is still inconclusive, with estimates ranging from ca. 1586 to 1605. This essay follows the recent dating arguments proposed by John Jowett in appendix 4 of the Arden edition (415–60). For a survey of the arguments dating the Original Text, see G. Harold Metz, “‘Voice and credyt’: The Scholars and Sir Thomas More,” in Shakespeare and “Sir Thomas More” (see n. 6), 11–44, esp. 25–29. For more on the dating of the Additions, see Scott McMillin, The Elizabethan Theatre and The Book of Sir Thomas More (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1987), 94, and Gary Taylor, “The Date and Auspices of the Additions to Sir Thomas More,” in Shakespeare and “Sir Thomas More,” 101–29. Attribution critics continue to debate the identities of the different hands labeled A, B, C, D, and E by W. W. Greg in his 1911 edition. Most critics agree on Henry Chettle (Hand A), Thomas Heywood (Hand B), a professional scribe (Hand C), William Shakespeare (Hand D), and Thomas Dekker (Hand E) as the likely contributors to the manuscript. For a recent reevaluation of these attributions, see Jowett, Sir Thomas More, 415–23, 433–60. 13 Though methodologically varied, ecocriticism often involves some version of this self-conscious literary shuttling. To demonstrate this methodological throughline, I have quoted from three ecocritical studies that take up very different objects of analysis: on how the category of the premodern has shaped strands of environmental thinking throughout history, see Vin Nardizzi and Tiffany Jo Werth, “Introduction: Oecologies: Engaging the World, from Here,” in Premodern Ecologies in the Modern Literary Imagination, ed. Nardizzi and Werth (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2019), 3–24, esp. 3; on global environmentalisms in the twenty-first century, see Ursula K. Heise, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008), 66; and on world literature and postcolonial ecocriticism, see Jennifer Wenzel, The Disposition of Nature: Environmental Crisis and World Literature (New York: Fordham UP, 2020), 21. 14 This essay rereads food scarcity as a form of “slow violence”—an “incremental and accretive” violence, in the words of Rob Nixon, that occurs “gradually and out of sight, . . . dispersed across time and space”; Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2011), 2. 15 On Shakespeare’s grain hoarding, see Boehrer, Environmental Degradation, 86–95. 16 Masten, “More or Less,” 119. The final section of this essay thus builds on recent critical work that reads Sir Thomas More as a coherent theatrical document. See, for instance, McMillin, The Elizabethan Theatre, and Nina Levine, Practicing the City: Early Modern London on Stage (New York: Fordham UP, 2016), 50–78. 17 Economic and social historians have debated whether London experienced a political crisis in the 1590s, but most agree that the decade was shaped by dearth. For a sense of the debate surrounding the degree of crisis in the 1590s, see Ian W. Archer, The Pursuit of Stability: Social Relations in Elizabethan London (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991), 9–17, and M. J. Power, “London and the Control of the ‘Crisis’ of the 1590s,” History 70.230 (1985): 371–85. 18 Though estimates vary, London’s population likely grew from between 40,000 and 50,000 in 1500 to around 200,000 in 1600; see table 3.1 in Roger Finlay, Population and Metropolis: The Demography of London 1580–1650 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1981); appendix 1 in Jan De Vries, European Urbanization, 1500–1800 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1984); and David Harris Sacks, “London’s Dominion: The Metropolis, the Market Economy, and the State,” in Material London, ca. 1600, ed. Lena Cowen Orlin (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2000), 20–54, esp. 22. As Boehrer has argued, this 300 percent population growth might be misleading as a marker of scale, but it still “remains valuable as an index of systemic stress” (Environmental Degradation, 3). 19 On harvest failures, see W. G. Hoskins, “Harvest Fluctuations and English Economic History, 1470–1619,” Agricultural History Review 12.1 (1964): 28–46, esp. 32. 20 R. B. Outhwaite, “Dearth, The English Crown and the ‘Crisis of the 1590s,’” in The European Crisis of the 1590s: Essays in Comparative History, ed. Peter Clark (Boston: G. Allen and Unwin, 1985), 23–43. Flour prices in London increased by 190 percent between 1595 and 1597, and other foods experienced similar inflation; see Steve Rappaport, “Social Structure and Mobility in Sixteenth-Century London: Part 1,” London Journal 9.2 (1983): 107–35, esp. 128. 21 Archer, Pursuit of Stability, 6. 22 For a vivid description of these riots, see Roger B. Manning, Village Revolts: Social Protest and Popular Disturbances in England, 1509–1640 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1988), esp. 209–11. 23 Thomas Heywood, The First and Second Parts of King Edward IV, ed. Richard Rowland (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2005). Not only does Edward IV imagine a version of London overflowing with food, but the distribution of food throughout the two-part play helps convey the uniquely civic virtue of London’s inhabitants, especially in opposition to the tyrannical actions of their monarchs. In Part I, King Edward first sees Jane Shore, a citizen’s wife, at a feast thrown by the Lord Mayor to celebrate the city’s victory against Falconbridge’s rebels. Stricken by Jane’s beauty, Edward abruptly ends the feast, thereby violating the Lord Mayor’s hospitality, and decides to abduct Jane and keep her as his mistress. In Part II, the tyrannical King Richard III sentences Jane to death by starvation. Violating the king’s orders, London citizens prepare and covertly deliver “homely cates” and “halfpenny loaves” to relieve her suffering (20.191, 255). 24 See, for instance, the journeyman Firk’s description of the feast at 18.190–94 in Thomas Dekker, The Shoemaker’s Holiday, ed. Jonathan Gil Harris (London: Methuen Drama, 2008). 25 Jean E. Howard, “Competing Ideologies of Commerce in Thomas Heywood’s If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody, Part II,” in The Culture of Capital: Property, Cities, and Knowledge in Early Modern England, ed. Henry S. Turner (London: Routledge, 2002), 163–82, 67. 26 Raphael Holinshed, The Third Volume of Chronicles (London, 1587), STC (2nd ed.) 13569, sig. Llll4v. Taken from the Early English Books Online (EEBO) facsimile of the Huntington Library copy. See also Edward Hall, The Unyon of the Two Noble and Illustre Famelies of Lancastre and Yorke (London, 1550), STC (2nd ed.) 12723a, sig. KKk5v. Taken from the EBBO facsimile of the British Library copy. 27 Holinshed, Third Volume of Chronicles, sig. Llll4v. Both “heartburning” and “sauciness” had food connotations in this period; see OED Online (Oxford: Oxford UP, September 2021), http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/85078?rskey=F5SipA&result=1&isAdvanced=false (accessed February 19, 2022), s.v. “heartburn, n.,” 2; http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/171348?rskey=VJz5cP&result=1&isAdvanced=false (accessed February 19, 2022), s.v. “saucy, adj.1,” 1. 28 Holinshed, Third Volume of Chronicles, sig. Llll5r; see also Hall, The Unyon, sig. KKk6v. 29 Holinshed describes how “the Sundaie after at Greenwich in the kings gallerie was Francis de Bard, who (as yee haue heard) kept an Englishmans wife and his goods, and yet he could haue no remedie; and with him were Domingo, Anthonie Caueler, and manie more strangers, and there they talking with Sir Thomas Palmer knight, iested and laughed how that Francis kept the Englishmans wife, saieng that if they had the maiors wife of London they would keepe hir. . . . There were diuerse English merchants by, who heard them laugh, and were not content, in so much as one William Bolt a mercer said; Well you whoreson Lombards, you reioice and laugh, by the masse we will one daie haue a fling at you, come when it will” (Third Volume of Chronicles, sig. Llll5r). See also Hall, The Unyon, sig. KKk6v. 30 Buchanan Sharp, “Shakespeare’s Coriolanus and the Crisis of the 1590s,” in Law and Authority in Early Modern England: Essays Presented to Thomas Garden Barnes, ed. Sharp and Mark Charles Fissel (Newark: U of Delaware P, 2007), 27–63, esp. 45. 31 On the long history of the Book of Orders, see John Bohstedt, The Politics of Provisions: Food Riots, Moral Economy, and Market Transition in England, c. 1550–1850 (London: Routledge, 2016), 69–77. 32 Hugh Alley, Hugh Alley’s Caveat: The Markets of London in 1598: Folger MS V.a. 318, ed. Ian Archer, Caroline Barron, and Vanessa Harding (London: London Topographical Society, 1988), 35. 33 Acts of the Privy Council of England, ed. John Roche Dasent, 32 vols. (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1901–07), 26:96. Accordingly, on August 18, the Lord Mayor ordered citizens to forgo suppers on Wednesdays and Fridays and to give what they saved to the poor; see London Metropolitan Archives, COL/AD/1/25 (Letter Book AA), fol. 67b, as quoted by Norman Scott Brien Gras, The Evolution of the English Corn Market from the Twelfth to the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1915), 456–57. 34 On the sequencing of the revisions, see Jowett, Sir Thomas More, 368–69. 35 Levine, Practicing the City, 74; Tracey Hill, “‘The Cittie Is in an Uproare’: Staging London in The Booke of Sir Thomas More,” Early Modern Literary Studies 11.1 (2005): 2.1–19, esp. 2.13; and R. W. Chambers, “The Expression of Ideas—Particularly Political Ideas—in the Three Pages, and in Shakespeare,” in Shakespeare’s Hand (see n. 6), 142–87. Chambers asks, “who can fail to love a rioter whose grievance against the aliens is that ‘they bring in strange roots . . . ’?” (177). Joan Fitzpatrick is the only critic to take the play’s concerns about food seriously, but she links those concerns to England’s colonial projects in Ireland rather than to London’s provisioning problems; see Food in Shakespeare: Early Modern Dietaries and the Plays (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007), 83–93. 36 For “race riot,” see Richard Wilson, “Making Men of Monsters: Shakespeare in the Company of Strangers,” Shakespeare 1 (2005): 8–28, 22. 37 On London’s role in the development of national provisioning policies, see Gras, Evolution of the English Corn Market, 221–42, esp. 229; R. B. Outhwaite, “Dearth and Government Intervention in English Grain Markets,” Economic History Review 34.3 (1981): 389–406, esp. 399–400; and Paul Slack, “Dearth and Social Policy in Early Modern England,” Social History of Medicine 5.1 (1992): 1–17. 38 Outhwaite, “Dearth and Government Intervention,” 399–400. In 1602, for instance, the Privy Council accused the Lord Mayor and aldermen of failing to “provide a good proportion of corn to be kept in the City’s store for the relief of the citizens in time of dearth or scarcity” and ordered them to “remedy the same immediately”; see Analytical Index to the Remembrancia, ed. H. C. and W. H. Overall (London: E. J. Francis, 1878), 381. The Remembrancia is filled with such negotiations between the Privy Council and city officials regarding London’s food (373–91). 39 Peter Bowden, “Agricultural Prices, Farm Profits, and Rents,” in The Agrarian History of England and Wales, gen. ed. Joan Thirsk, 8 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1967–2001), 4:593–695, 594. Bowden argues that the influence of inflation on this trend is overstated. Instead, population growth was the most “powerful stimulating influence” on prices in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries (597). 40 On the rise of private marketing and its controversies, see Alan Everitt, “The Marketing of Agricultural Produce,” in The Agrarian History (see n. 39), 4:406–592, esp. 506–86. 41 Act of the Privy Council of England, 27:8, 15, 17, 45. On corn imports from the Baltic in the 1590s, see Power, “London and the Control of the ‘Crisis,’” 373. On London’s foreign grain imports, see Gras, Evolution of the English Corn Market, 99–104, 275. 42 For instance, London’s port books of 1567–68 record the arrival of sugar and treacle from Barbary and Genoa via Antwerp, a ship from Spain that contained nothing but 40,000 oranges, and huge quantities of Eastern and West Indian spices via Antwerp and Amsterdam; cited in Joan Thirsk, Food in Early Modern England: Phases, Fads, Fashions 1500–1760 (New York: Hambledon Continuum, 2007), 30–31. On the general increase in overseas trade, see Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550–1653 (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1993), and K. R. Andrews, Trade, Plunder, and Settlement: Maritime Enterprise and the Genesis of the British Empire, 1480–1630 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998). 43 F. J. Fisher, “The Development of the London Food Market, 1540–1640,” Economic History Review 5.2 (1935): 46–64, 50. The grain imported from the domestic coastal trade alone increased from 18,090 quarters to 84,607 quarters between 1580 and 1650; see Gras, Evolution of the English Corn Market, 104–109. 44 Power, “London and the Control of the ‘Crisis,’” 372. 45 Fisher, “The Development of the London Food Market,” 64. Even Power, who is skeptical about the degree of food scarcity that London endured, admits that “what was not a thorough crisis for those in authority might well have been perceived as a crisis by those they governed” (“London and the Control of the ‘Crisis,’” 385). 46 Donald Lupton, London and the countrey carbonadoed and quartred into seuerall characters (London, 1632), sig. B1v. Taken from the EEBO facsimile of the British Library copy. 47 For a reading of the phrase “watery parsnips” as distinctly Shakespearean, see John Jones, Shakespeare at Work (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995), 25–26. 48 On manuring, see Malcolm Thick, “Market Gardening in England and Wales,” in The Agrarian History (see n.39), 5.2:505. 49 Thick, “Market Gardening in England and Wales,” 5.2:505. The Revels edition assumes that Lincoln confuses parsnips with potatoes; see Vittorio Gabrieli and Giorgio Melchiori, ed., “Sir Thomas More”: A Play by Anthony Munday and Others (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1990), 95. Fitzpatrick follows this assumption and consequently links these complaints to anti-Irish sentiments (Food in Shakespeare, 89–93). But in this version of the insurrection, the foreigners have Dutch names, such as de Barde, Peter van Hollack, and Adriane Martin (4.27), and Clown Betts plans to “butter their boxes” (4.2; “butterbox” was slang for Dutchman); see Rubright, Doppelganger Dilemmas, 53. 50 Thirsk, Food in Early Modern England, 34–35, 288; Malcolm Thick, “Root Crops and the Feeding of London’s Poor in the Late Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries,” in English Rural Society, 1500–1800: Essays in Honor of Joan Thirsk, ed. John Chartres and David Hey (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990), 279–96. 51 Quoted in Joan Thirsk, Alternative Agriculture: A History from the Black Death to the Present Day (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997), 48. 52 Rembert Dodoens, A new herball, or historie of plants . . . first translated out of French into English, by Henrie Lyte Esquire (London, 1586), STC (2nd ed.) 6985, sig. XX5v. Taken from the EEBO facsimile of the Huntington Library copy. 53 Sir Hugh Plat, Sundrie new and artificiall remedies against famine. Written by H.P. Esq. vppon the occasion of this present dearth (London, 1596), STC (2nd ed.) 1996, sig. B3r, B4v, B2r. Taken from the EEBO facsimile of the Huntington Library copy. 54 Plat, Sundrie new and artificiall remedies, sig. B2r. 55 John Gerard, The herball or Generall historie of plantes (London, 1597), STC (2nd ed.) 11750, sigs. Iii3v, Ccc4r. Taken from the EEBO facsimile of the Huntington Library copy. 56 Richard Gardiner, Profitable instructions for the manuring, sowing, and planting of kitchin gardens (London, 1603), STC (2nd ed.) 11571, sig. D2v. Taken from the EEBO facsimile of the British Library copy. 57 Thirsk, Food in Early Modern England, 288. On root vegetables in other Shakespeare plays, see Frances E. Dolan, Digging the Past: How and Why to Imagine Seventeenth-Century Agriculture (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2020), 45–80, and Rebecca Laroche, “‘Cabbage and roots’ and the Difference of Merry Wives,” in The Merry Wives of Windsor: New Critical Essays, ed. Evelyn Gajowski and Phyllis Rackin (Abingdon: Routledge, 2015), 184–94. 58 On the influence of the urban food riots of 1590s, see Sharp, “Shakespeare’s Coriolanus and the Crisis of the 1590s,” 27–63. On the influence of the Midlands Uprising, see Andrew Gurr, “Coriolanus and the Body Politic,” Shakespeare Survey 28 (1975): 63–69, and Nate Eastman, “The Rumbling Belly Politic: Metaphorical Location and Metaphorical Government in Coriolanus,” Early Modern Literary Studies 13.1 (2007): 2.1–39. 59 Eklund, Literature and Moral Economy, 77. 60 Eklund, Literature and Moral Economy, 54. Eklund also identifies 2 Henry VI’s version of Lancastrian England as another such “distributive dystopia.” 61 Jowett suggests this scene might take place at the Tower of London, instead (Sir Thomas More, scene 5n). 62 Masten, “More or Less,” 117. 63 Masten links this “structure of replacement and rhetorical cross-identification” to sumptuary laws (“More or Less,” 118). 64 Levine, Practicing the City, 50. See also Hill, “‘The Cittie Is in an Uproare,’” 2.2, and Lawrence Manley, Literature and Culture in Early Modern London (New York: Cambridge UP, 1995), 27–39. 65 In the 1518 Basle edition, More is described four times as “INCLYTAE CIVITATIS LONDINENESIS CIVIS & VICECOMITIS” (Citizen and Sheriff of the famous City of London) in imposing Roman capital letters. More’s self-composed epitaph also identified him as “urbe Londinensi familia non celebri sed honesta natus”; see Manley, Literature and Culture in Early Modern London, 35. 66 David Harris Sacks, introduction to Utopia, by Sir Thomas More, ed. Sacks, trans. Ralph Robinson (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1999), 65–66. 67 Sacks, introduction to Utopia, 67–68. William B. Long has even gone so far as to claim that the play was “originally commissioned (or at least suggested or approved) by some government official(s) as an aid in dealing with the problem of civil uproar in general”; “The Occasion of The Book of Sir Thomas More,” in Shakespeare and “Sir Thomas More” (see n. 6), 45–56, 49. 68 In their introduction to the Revels edition of Sir Thomas More, Gabrieli and Melchiori note that this scene is “pure invention” on the author’s part (9). None of the main sources for the play recounts More feasting the Lord Mayor. 69 See Jowett, Sir Thomas More, 13.162n. Mace would have been imported from the Moluccas in Indonesia by the Portuguese, who had a monopoly in trade there for almost a century. By the beginning of the seventeenth century, the Dutch managed to gain some control over trade routes in the region; see Alan Davidson, The Oxford Companion to Food (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2014), 561. 70 Peter Remien, The Concept of Nature in Early Modern English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2019), 3–4. 71 See Matthew 3:10; Luke 3:9. 72 Masten, “More or Less,” 119. 73 On provisioning touring actors, see Barbara D. Palmer, “On the Road and on the Wagon,” in Locating the Queen’s Men, 1583–1603, ed. Helen Ostovich, Holger Schott Syme, and Andrew Griffin (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009), 27–39, esp. 28. 74 For a Shakespearean critique of the concept of sustainability, see Steve Mentz, “Strange Weather in King Lear,” Shakespeare 6.2 (2010): 139–52. 75 On some of the premodern roots of our current environmental crisis, see Hillary Eklund, ed., Ground-Work: English Renaissance Literature and Soil Science (Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 2017) 2–3; Ken Hiltner, What Else Is Pastoral? Renaissance Literature and the Environment (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2011), 2; Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1980), 1–3; Nardizzi and Werth, “Introduction: Oecologies,” 7–8; and Lynn White Jr., “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis,” Science 155 (1967): 1203–1207. 76 The numerous contracts involving playhouse provisioning help remind us that selling food at the theaters was very much a commercial rather than charitable enterprise. See, for instance, Gabriel Egan, “John Heminges’s Tap-House at the Globe,” Theatre Notebook 55.2 (2001): 72–77. 77 Andrew Gurr, Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004), 299–300, and Farah Karim-Cooper, “Touch and Taste in Shakespeare’s Theatres,” in Shakespeare’s Theatres and the Effects of Performance, ed. Karim-Cooper and Tiffany Stern (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2013), 214–36. 78 Julian Bowsher and Pat Miller, The Rose and the Globe: Playhouses of Shakespeare’s Bankside, Southwark: Excavations 1988–91 (London: Museum of London Archaeology, 2009), 146–52. I have derived likely sources for these foods from Thirsk, Food in Early Modern England, 9–10, 74–77, and Thirsk, Agrarian History, 4:196, 510–11. On the origins of the pumpkin, see Mark McWilliams, “The American Pumpkin,” in Vegetables: Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery 2008, ed. Susan R. Friedland (Totnes, Devon: Prospect Books, 2009), 132–38. On shellfish, see Drew Smith, Oyster: A Gastronomic History (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2015), 52–97. © Folger Shakespeare Library 2022. All rights reserved. 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TI - “Strange roots”: Rereading Food Scarcity in Sir Thomas More
JF - Shakespeare Quarterly
DO - 10.1093/sq/quac010
DA - 2022-06-25
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/strange-roots-rereading-food-scarcity-in-sir-thomas-more-pV0qyj2ZXp
SP - 25
EP - 51
VL - 72
IS - 1-2
DP - DeepDyve
ER -